Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis, Kt (born 29 April 1957) is an English actor.[1] He holds both British and Irish citizenship. Born and raised in London, he excelled on stage at the National Youth Theatre, before being accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which he attended for three years. Despite his traditional actor training at the Bristol Old Vic, he is considered to be a method actor, known for his constant devotion to and research of his roles.[2][3] He often remains completely in character for the duration of the shooting schedules of his films, even to the point of adversely affecting his health. He is one of the most selective actors in the film industry, having starred in only five films since 1998, with as many as five years between roles.[4]

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Day-Lewis was born in London, the son of poet Cecil Day-Lewis and English actress Jill Balcon. His father, who was born in Ballintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland, was of ProtestantAnglo-Irish and English background, lived in England from the age of two, and later became the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.[7] Daniel's mother was Jewish, and his maternal grandparents' families had emigrated to England from Latvia and Poland.[8][9] His maternal grandfather, Michael Balcon, an important figure in the history of British cinema, was the head of Ealing Studios.[10] Two years after his birth, the family moved to Croom's Hill, Greenwich, south-east London, where Day-Lewis grew up along with his older sister, Tamasin, who became a documentary filmmaker and television chef.[11]

Living in Greenwich, Day-Lewis found himself among tough South London children, and, being partially Jewish and "posh", he was often bullied.[12] He mastered the local accent and mannerisms and credits that as being his first convincing performance.[12][13] Later in life, he was known to speak of himself as very much a disorderly character in his younger years, often in trouble for shoplifting and other petty crimes.[13][14]

In 1968, Day-Lewis' parents, finding his behaviour to be too wild, sent him to the independent Sevenoaks School in Kent as a boarder.[14] Though he detested the school, he was introduced to his three most prominent interests: woodworking, acting, and fishing. His disdain for the school grew, and after two years at Sevenoaks, he was transferred to another independent school, Bedales in Petersfield, Hampshire,[15] which his sister attended, and which had a more relaxed and creative ethos.[14] The transfer led to his film debut at the age of 14 in Sunday Bloody Sunday in which he played a vandal in an uncredited role. He described the experience as "heaven", for getting paid £2 to vandalise expensive cars parked outside his local church.[11]

For a few weeks in 1972, he and his parents and sister lived at Lemmons, the north London home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Cecil Day-Lewis had cancer and Howard invited the family to Lemmons as a place they could use to rest and recuperate. Cecil died there in May that year.[16]

During the early '80s, Day-Lewis worked in theatre and television including Frost in May (where he played an impotent man-child) and How Many Miles to Babylon? (as a World War I[18] officer torn between allegiances to Britain and Ireland) for the BBC. Eleven years after his film debut, Day-Lewis continued his film career with a small part in Gandhi (1982) as Colin, a street thug who bullies the title character, only to be immediately chastised by his high-strung mother. In late 1982 he had his big theatre break when he took over the lead in Another Country. The following year, he had a supporting role as the conflicted, but ultimately loyal first mate in The Bounty, after which he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream.[14]

Day-Lewis threw his personal version of method acting into full throttle in 1989 with his performance as Christy Brown in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot, which garnered him numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor. He prepared for his role by frequent visits to Sandymount School Clinic in Dublin, where he formed friendships with several people with disabilities, some of whom had no speech.[21] During filming, he refused to break character.[14] Playing a severely paralysed character on screen, off screen Day-Lewis had to be moved around the set in his wheelchair, and crew members would curse at having to lift him over camera and lighting wires, all so that he might gain insight into all aspects of Brown's life, including the embarrassments.[13] It was rumoured that he had broken two ribs during filming from assuming a hunched-over position in his wheelchair for so many weeks, something he denied years later at the 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.[22]

Day-Lewis returned to the stage in 1989 to work with Richard Eyre, in Hamlet at the National Theatre, London, but collapsed during the scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears before him.[14] He began sobbing uncontrollably and refused to go back on stage; he was replaced by Jeremy Northam who finished the performance word-and-action-perfect and received a standing ovation. Ian Charleson then formally replaced Day-Lewis for the rest of the run, except that ill-health forced Northam to stand in again many times. Although the incident was officially attributed to exhaustion, Day-Lewis later claimed to have seen the ghost of his own father.[14][23][24] He has not appeared on stage since.[24] The media attention following his breakdown on-stage contributed to his decision to eventually move from England to Ireland in the mid-1990s to regain a sense of privacy amidst his increasing fame.[25]

In 1992, three years after his Oscar win, The Last of the Mohicans was released. Day-Lewis's character research for this film was well-publicized; he reportedly underwent rigorous weight training and learned to live off the land and forest where his character lived, camping, hunting and fishing.[14] Day-Lewis also added to his wood-working skills and learned how to make canoes.[26] He even carried a long rifle at all times during filming to remain in character and learned how to skin animals.[14][27]

He returned to work with Jim Sheridan on In the Name of the Father, in which he played Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four who were wrongfully convicted of a bombing carried out by the Provisional IRA. He lost a substantial amount of weight for the part, kept his Northern Irish accent on and off the set for the entire shooting schedule, and spent stretches of time in a prison cell.[27] He also insisted that crew members throw cold water at him and verbally abuse him.[27] The film earned him his second Academy Award nomination, his third BAFTA nomination, and his second Golden Globe nomination.

Following The Boxer, Day-Lewis took a leave of absence from acting by going into "semi-retirement" and returning to his old passion of woodworking.[30] He moved to Florence, Italy, where he became intrigued by the craft of shoemaking, eventually apprenticing as a shoemaker.[14] For a time his exact whereabouts and actions were not made publicly known.[31] Day-Lewis has declined to discuss this period of his life, stating that "it was a period of my life that I had a right to, without any intervention of that kind."

After a five-year absence from filming, Day-Lewis returned to act in the multiple Academy Award-nominated film Gangs of New York (2002), directed by Scorsese and produced by Harvey Weinstein. In his role as the villain gang leader William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, he starred alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, who played Bill's young protégé. He began his lengthy, self-disciplined process by taking lessons as an apprentice butcher, and while filming, he was never out of character between takes (including keeping his character's New York accent).[14] At one point during filming, having been diagnosed with pneumonia, he refused to wear a warmer coat or to take treatment because it was not in keeping with the period; however, he was eventually persuaded to seek medical treatment.[32] His performance in Gangs of New York earned him his third Academy Award nomination and won him the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

After Gangs of New York, Day-Lewis's wife, director Rebecca Miller offered him the lead role in her film The Ballad of Jack and Rose, in which he played a dying man with regrets over how his life had evolved and over how he had brought up his teenage daughter. During filming he arranged to live separately from his wife to achieve the "isolation" needed to focus on his own character's reality.[11] The film received mixed reviews.[33]

Day-Lewis rarely discusses his personal life. He had a relationship with French actress Isabelle Adjani, which lasted six years[2] and eventually ended after a split and reconciliation. Their son Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis was born in 1995 in New York City, several months after the relationship ended.

In 1996, while working on the film version of the stage play The Crucible, he visited the home of playwright Arthur Miller where he was introduced to the writer's daughter, Rebecca Miller.[2] They married later that year. The couple have two sons, Ronan Cal Day-Lewis (born 1998) and Cashel Blake Day-Lewis (born 2002) and divide their time between their homes in New York City and Ireland.[11]

Day-Lewis became an Irish citizen in 1993[45] and currently holds British and Irish dual citizenship. He has lived in Annamoe, County Wicklow since 1997.[46][47][48] He stated "I do have dual citizenship, but I think of England as my country. I miss London very much but I couldn't live there because there came a time when I needed to be private and was forced to be public by the press. I couldn't deal with it".[49] He is a supporter of South-East London football club Millwall.[50]

In June 2014, Day-Lewis was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to drama.[6][54] Coincidentally in 2008, when receiving the Academy Award for Best Actor from Helen Mirren (who was on presenting duty having won the previous year's Best Actress Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen) Day-Lewis knelt before her and she tapped him on each shoulder with the Oscar statuette, to which he quipped; "That's the closest I'll come to ever getting a knighthood".[55] In November 2014, Day-Lewis was formally knighted by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge at Buckingham Palace.[56]

^Jackson, Laura (2005). Daniel Day-Lewis: the biography. Blake. p. 3. ISBN1-85782-557-8. Michael Balcon's family were Latvian refugees from Riga who had come to England around the turn of the 20th century. The family of his wife, Aileen Leatherman, whom he married in 1924, came from Poland.